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Spotlight on Kids’ Welfare Blacked Out By TDS
In the New Yorker today I read a powerful piece about a young Baltimore student left utterly adrift by the sudden closure of his public school. It’s the kind of story that should have been written dozens of times in dozens of cities by now but hasn’t. We all know why.
The effect of Trump’s declaration was instantaneous. Teachers who had been responsive to the idea of returning to the classroom suddenly regarded the prospect much more warily. “Our teachers were ready to go back as long as it was safe,” Randi Weingarten, the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. “Then Trump and DeVos played their political [malarkey].” Ryan Hooper, the former soldier, saw the effect on his colleagues. “It was really unhelpful,” he said.
A week later, the Baltimore Teachers Union and the Maryland State Education Association sent a four-page letter to the Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, a Republican, and the state superintendent of schools, Karen Salmon, calling on them to bar any in-person instruction for the first semester. They noted that, by one count, nearly a quarter of teachers nationwide were considered especially susceptible to the virus, and cited the lack of funding for personal protective equipment and testing. They questioned whether students could be counted on to wear masks, wash their hands and practice social distancing.
Teachers had been responsive to doing their jobs… until President Trump weighed in about how important it was that they, in fact, did their jobs.
Teachers in districts planning an in-person start have taken part in mass “sick-outs,” forcing the cancellation of in-person learning. We keep hearing “it’s not the teachers, it’s the unions” pushing for virtual learning to continue, but that’s not what I’m seeing anecdotally or on the ground. Where are the teachers protesting their unions and publicly stating how vitally important it is they get back to teaching in-person? Their silence is deafening.
My patience for those in the teaching profession is at an all-time low. I’m not sure what more needs to happen before we come to the realization that the public school model isn’t working, and if kids are going to have a chance at coming out of this crisis intact, they need to be able to take the public money allocated for their education and attend institutions with teachers who actually care about them.
Published in General
“Suddenly”.
I can’t help but think that many if not most of these teachers etc, expect that their actions will help a Biden win. But I expect it’s just the opposite.
For once, maybe it’s a good thing if teachers really aren’t all that smart.
As Scott Adams says: The Teachers’ union is the only systemic racism of which he is aware. They fight quality education, particularly for those inner city kids who would benefit from education in a private or charter school.
I encourage people to read Thomas Sowell’s recent book about Charter Schools.
I saw this story last week on Yahoo! News. Although I have almost no respect for the Yahoo! news organization–they seem to have one goal in life right now, to get rid of our current president–this story is quite plausible to me, and I’m glad they are running it. The story describes how difficult daily life has become for many college students whose schools and dorms have closed because of the pandemic:
I have no doubt that these kids are stranded. This started when the colleges summarily shut their campuses down last April.
Many of their students are living financially precarious lives to get their education. Clearly, these students are invisible to the staff and administrators who quickly hurried away from these campuses.
Yes, I know the students are adults. And, yes, I know that they really aren’t the responsibility of the colleges. Still, it seems so cold-hearted to me that there has not been a greater effort to help the less fortunate students on the campuses. How do you teach the values of western civilization and humanitarianism traditions while you turn away from your own students?
If nothing else, the hypocrisy of the Marxists who teach at these schools is mind-boggling. They care not one whit about the poor.
Ah, there’s your mistake. If they were really poor, they wouldn’t be going to college!
https://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2020/07/24/lamar-alexander-tim-scott-introduce-school-choice-now-act/
They are living out a fantasy of being Sharansky in the Gulag. Trump is the KGB, and the teachers will do the opposite of whatever he wants.
As Glenn Reynolds keeps saying the Babylon Bee is now the newspaper of record.
Just be sure to burn down all the voting places too.
The Bee is satirizing a viewpoint which is common in blue states: Hillary is the legitimate president. Anything that looks like collaborating with the usurper is not permitted.
Whether Baltimore parents will go for that if their schools shut down remains to be seen.
Our school district here in Texas is already at the end of its first six-weeks grading period, and so far none of the campuses are crypts of walking COVID death among the teaching staff, though there have been cases of staff having to quarantine because of coronavirus-poisitive tests and a few actual cases with things like vomiting and loss of smell and taste.
So basically, a fairly normal first six weeks of school in terms of staff health levels, just that instead of regular flu, it’s COVID, and where precautions are being offered/taken for teachers with potential comorbidities. In a state without the strict teacher’s union controls, it’s something that’s being worked through, though the biggest school districts in the state with the most politicized teachers are just now getting back into class, so you may see more freak-outs in those areas between now and Election Day.
Local officials should pull a Reagan.
Fire them.
“Less fortunate students on campus” is a oxymoron. If they are going to college, they are fortunate. Plus, I live in a town with a major university. There are help wanted signs all over. To me, teaching the values of western civilization means teaching people to stand on their own (with exceptions for those that truly can’t).
I think the reason that our schools systems are in such bad shape can be explained by a conversation I had with some friends in a bar a few years ago.
First a little background. A few decades ago, a young engineer that I worked with accepted a job with Toyota in Japan. He married a Japanese woman, and they had two children. A few years ago he came back to town. An informal reunion was arranged and we met in a bar. During our conversation, he explained that he and his family were moving to the States. His kids, now teenagers, were excited because they knew that they would no longer have to spend so many hours on their education. He then went on to explain how many hours his kids spent in class, and studying at home. The responses from those around the table were things like, “That’s crazy”, & “That’s too much pressure on kids”. I looked at those around the table and stated, “If he had told you his kids were spending that much time learning to dribble a basketball, you would all be saying “That’s great”. It got quiet of a few seconds and another friend said, “You know, your right”.
Our schools are in bad shape because we don’t value education. We don’t think twice about paying thousands of dollars a year for our kid to play on a traveling soccer team. Then we spend hundreds of hours driving them to, and sitting through, practice and to games. If the coach was incompetent we certainly would complain. On the other hand, few parents would ever consider forking over that same money to provide a tutor for their kids, or spend hundreds of hours helping them study. We almost never criticize incompetent teachers.
If we cared about education, we would never have allowed things to get so bad.
My daughter is still in daycare, thank goodness, because I don’t know how I could possibly work full-time and deal with this distance learning [preemptively redacted]. What the schools are doing is utter nonsense and, unfortunately but predictably, it will be the already disadvantaged children who bear the brunt of this.
One possible solution is to direct the money devoted to education to the parents with some support to the concept of “Education Pods.” These are small groups doing home schooling. I know the inner city underclass will take the money and ignore education but that is what is happening now. Among black mothers who do want education for their kids, and there is a non-trivial number, they could find private academies that charge modest tuition. They line up for charter school registration.
Well, let’s see now…Since the students of Baltimore public high schools have a 0% proficiency in math, perhaps it’s not such a bad idea that there are no classes. What’s lower than 0%?
https://factnotfiction.media/2020/07/19/0-math-proficiency-in-13-baltimore-high-schools/
How can they grow up to be drug dealers if they can’t count their money?